The lead is razor thin and well within the margin of error. But it's only May. Trump's numbers are all moving up. Meanwhile, Hillary has been bumping along horizontally and she has so many as-of-yet unexploited vulnerabilities that it's hard to see much of a way for her to ascend. Polls of "likely voters" are, other things equal, superior to those of "registered voters", and Trump's lead is largest in the only "likely voters" poll included in the average. Trump unofficially ended the Republican primaries substantially outperforming his polling numbers. Hillary can't keep pace (see Oregon, for example).

The Clintons are in trouble.

Parenthetically, picking Sanders as vice president would probably reset the general election match up to a month ago when Hillary averaged a 5-10 point lead. Besides the bad blood between Sanders and the Democrat party machine, this would of course mean a white-white Democrat ticket. I won't be alone in the schadenfreude I'll enjoy if we get to see that straining the precarious unity of the Coalition of the Fringes.

* Silver, who claims the biggest mistake he made in the Republican primary process was acting like a pundit and failing to create a quantitative model to support his predictions and here he is repeating the same allegedly flawed process for the general election. It wasn't the lack of a formalized model per se, though, that caused him to miss so spectacularly, it was his failure to look at the most relevant indicators that did.

8 comments:

Follow Nate's money. Hell, follow all the political consultant's money.

Nate Silver being wrong inside the NY TIMES group think cocoon is more lucrative for him than being right outside it.

This is the biggest reason the pundits and consultant class has been wrong about Trump.

The really good political consultants -- the ones you don't hear about about that work for the billionaires -- could make out what Trump was after San Bernadino.

They just could not tell their clients Trump had won then, and stay employed.

They will tell their clients what happened...after Trump wins.

Their paycheck depends on it.

Consider...

Hillary is at 'peak political consultant.'

She has a 700(+) person campaign staff burning through her money. Each media ad buy approved and vetted by contributors before airing with fund raisers getting their slices on the front and back ends, AKA a commission for the finds brought in and a percentage of the media Ad buy.

This makes her s-l-o-w because of all the approvals involved in making the ads, funding the ads and getting everyone a shot a p*ssing in the pot and above all the consultants being so concerned about not making a mistake they cannot win.

The old saying of "An NFL 'prevent defense' prevents you from winning" applies.

Trump has a 70 person political campaign. He is his own media brand and media consultant. He gets more via free media than every other candidate combined because he is unafraid of making mistakes.

You cannot say Trump is fearless, but highly experienced, calculating and willing to take a lot of small well informed risks...oh hell yeah!

Not having consultant class infrastructure like Hillary and the other major part candidates means he can take advantage of events to shape them.

He did that with Paris, San Bernadino and now MS804.

Trump is not only inside Hillary's OODA loop (Observe, Orient Decide Act), he is living rent free inside her head.

Zito does have a big point buried by the "hating lead" she uses to protect her job --

Pollster Wes Anderson of OnMessage, a Washington-based Republican strategy group, says Politco's article finds that the vast majority of Trump primary supporters had voted in at least one of the last four presidential elections: “Really? If a voter skipped the 2008 (or) 2012 general election but now voted in a GOP primary, isn't that evidence that Trump is expanding the GOP vote?”

Anderson pointed to North Carolina's early-spring primary to prove his point: There in 2012, “inactive” voters (those who skipped one or more of the previous two presidential elections) made up just 2 percent of the vote. In 2016, they represented 12 percent.

“That's right, 12 percent of the primary had skipped one or both of the last two presidential general elections,” he explained. “We're talking about voters we would normally give up on because history would say they have given up on voting.”

This year they decided to vote in a primary. How does that not say something significant about what Trump may be doing to the voter pool? The number of truly “new” voters may be small but the number of independents participating in GOP primaries for the first time is big.

The same is true of Republicans who never participated in a primary, until now.

Politico's article is classic half-truth that stretches or distorts data to prove a preconceived point. If you miscalculate the voter universe now and don't understand what will drive it to vote, then you likely never understood this entire election cycle and will continue making the same miscalculations.

Meaning that November may shock the hell out of a lot of political professionals.

The prevent defense comparison is an apt one. I initially suspected it would be Clinton playing that between now and November, with Trump coming out about 10 points behind her in national polling initially and then spending that intervening six months making a 12-yard completion here and a 9-yard completion there. Clinton would try to run out the clock before Trump could score.

But in actuality it looks like we're in the first few minutes of the third quarter, the game is tied, and the only thing in team Clinton's playbook is prevent defense. It could be a blow out.

THIS TOO IS EVERYWHERE AND A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME: The Power Of Technical Disruption. https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/05/24/the-power-of-technical-disruption/

That lead to this blog post on Texas Fracking that had an interesting observation on Trump's foreign policy speech --

AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY AFTER BIG OIL Whether America elects another Democrat or a Republican in Nov. 2016, the reality is that America is set to move through energy independence to being a world energy supplier in a five-to-10-year time frame. This will utterly change America’s foreign policy & national security relations. Energy independence via the Oil & Gas Fracking Revolution gives future American leaders huge opportunities to be a “normal” national leaders in the historical, pre-WW2 American trade barriers, political isolationist, and American-unilateral-military-action-only-in-Latin-America senses.

Rather than having to be the “guardian of the Arabian Gulf” to insure the energy supply to the USA & Europe, America will be a direct energy export competitor with Russia, Iran and the Gulf Arabs.

Further, America will be stronger economically and militarily. American discretionary military power will rise as it is no longer pinned so heavily to the Mid-East. This will make Russia, China and North Korea as unhappy — albeit for different reasons — as Saudi Arabia.

In short, rather than being an international globalist, an energy independent or exporting America means American presidents can put American interests first.

If that sounded like a Trump political commercial for his foreign policy speech, please consider the following circumstantial evidence that Trump has been aware of the extended fracking technology for some time.

o Datum — The Bush clan hates Trump and won’t endorse him. The Bush clan are the premiere patrons of the Saudis inside the GOP.

o Datum — The Bush clan has openly broken with Dick Cheney. See what Pres George H.W. Bush’s book said with regard to Cheney.

o Datum — Dick Cheney — Mr. Halliburton — has endorsed Trump.

o Datum — Trump began his anti-Muslim remarks Nov 21, 2015 shortly after the Paris terrorist attacks by bringing up the Muslim celebrations of 9/11/2001 in Patterson, N.J. This was also shortly after Halliburton began its major frack-log drilling plays. Halliburton is one of the biggest if not the biggest player in frack-log drilling.

And now look at what Trump said in his speech here, and fully at the link below —

We will spend what we need to rebuild our military. It is the cheapest investment we can make. We will develop, build and purchase the best equipment known to mankind. Our military dominance must be unquestioned.

But we will look for savings and spend our money wisely. In this time of mounting debt, not one dollar can be wasted.

We are also going to have to change our trade, immigration and economic policies to make our economy strong again – and to put Americans first again. This will ensure that our own workers, right here in America, get the jobs and higher pay that will grow our tax revenue and increase our economic might as a nation.

The last sentence in the Trump foreign policy speech passage above makes a great deal more sense, given foreknowledge of the new extended oil fracking play.

For good or ill, we are now in the post-Big Oil economic age.

Trump's hotel business and the open source intelligence folks attached to his gambling operations seem to be on top of a lot of things we are not.

Trump also met with and was endorsed by Hamm, the guy behind the fracking revolution, and called out Kaisch as only being tolerated because the oil men were bringing money into his state. He definitely has a high awareness of the oil shale revolution which makes it all the more ironic that he lost to Cruz, who couldn't tell a Kelly bushing from a pump truck, in OK and TX.